The NEW home of the OH SO PRETTY Hillbilly Mom, nestled in the heart of DoNotLand, where the Gummi Mary appeared on a plate of melted Gummi Bears and was unceremoniously half-devoured by a DoNot, and dumped in the wastebasket. The excitement of that day was rivaled only by the New Year's Day trip to Save-A-Lot, where a woman followed Mrs. Hillbilly Mom, stroked her arm, asked if she was married, and declared, "You are SO PRETTY."

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Three Skunk Night

This has been a three-skunk night, my friends. Literally.

I stayed after school for the #1 son's academic team competition. What's a 13-hour day when your kid is starring on the academic team, I say. They kind of stunk up the place, winning one and losing two matches, but they were without some varsity players, and the sophomores got moved up, and it was just my boy and four of his freshman cronies competing against three other schools' JV teams.

We left school and went to pick up The Pony at my mom's house where he was watching Survivor. We missed our TV bonding ritual tonight, The Pony and I. On the way home, T-Hoe drove through three skunky clouds hanging low over the roadway. Yes. Not one. Not two. THREE skunks blessed the Hillbilly vehicle with their fragrance. One was by my mom's house, which is at least in the country. One was in town by an old Coca Cola bottling plant that has been converted to a church. And the last was on our county road approaching the Mansion.

That's the kind of day I've had. A three-skunk kind of day. A day filled with science projects about freaks smiling at people in The Devil's Playground to see if smiling is contagious, and concluding that it is, really, but that some people are just plain rude for not smiling back at freaks who stand in The Devil's doorway and fake-smile at them with their lips while their eyes are announcing that they would like to eat the smilee's liver with some fava beans and a nice Kool Aid.

A day filled with bad listeners in the classroom audience who ask an experimenter why he grew his seed plants in pee cups, because they have spent their entire young lives texting, and have no inkling of how plants may be raised or what peat is or how real people talk with their mouths in a strange, backward way of communicating.

A day filled with project presenters who SAY they have done the experiment, but have no data and can not tell you what size eggs they tried to float in salt water and laugh at the suggestion that eggs come in cartons marked Grade A Small, Medium, Large, or Extra Large, or tell you that they measured the temperature of soda placed in ice water and it was 20 degrees, which is kind of odd, really, because they even admit that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees, and can't explain how their soda can be colder than ice.

But it sure beats yesterday, when a student went to the wastebasket first cat out of the bag, and started digging through the freaking trash, holding up items and exclaiming, "A Pringles can? WHO has been eating Pringles? And soft-batch COOKIES! Who has been eating COOKIES?" Like she's a world-renowned anthropologist excavating items of historical significance. Back off, Margaret Mead, don't get your panties in a wad, it's not like we threw a Pringles-and-Keebler party after slipping you a rohypnol. It only means that The Pony has run out of after-school snacks in his major food groups. And Note-To-Self, hon...normal people don't dig through wastebaskets in front of the whole class. Just sayin'...

I had 10-foot encounter with a skunk several years ago. It's somewhere in my old blogs, but the gist of it is that a truck in front of me hit a skunk, and it flipped back under my car in full spray mode, and I just happened to be on the way to school, and the kids kept wrinkling their noses, and offered to spray me with perfume.